Sunday, October 19, 2014

Barth’s Rhetoric of the Holy Spirit

A longstanding criticism of Karl Barth has been that his christocentrism so overpowers his theology that pneumatology often seems to take a theological back-seat. This was especially noted by Robert Jenson’s famous article cleverly entitled, “You wonder where the Spirit went” [Pro Ecclesia II (1993): 296–304.] Jenson, and others, while highly sympathetic to Barth’s theology, nevertheless are concerned that Barth’s christological centre is so unmoving that sometimes all we hear is “Jesus Christ” when we would expect to be hearing “Holy Spirit.” This critique focused especially upon Barth’s pneumatology as evident in the Church Dogmatics (CD). [For a similar critique, see Eugene Rogers, “The Eclipse of the Spirit in Karl Barth,” In Conversing with Barth, 173–90. London: Ashgate, 2004.]

In reviewing Barth’s chapter in Evangelical Theology (ET) entitled, “The Spirit,” I observe that Barth employs a form of speaking about the Spirit–a kind of pneumatological rhetoric–that is consistent with the way he speaks of the Holy Spirit in the CD. The good thing is that Barth’s method at work in this short chapter in ET is, I believe, representative of how he speaks of the Spirit more generally in the (much longer!) CD. The chapter in ET, in other words, can serve as a primer for understanding Barth’s rhetoric of the Spirit more broadly in his theology.